How AI could unlock a new market in educational consulting

Cherry Sung co-authored this article.

As builders in the edtech space, we’ve seen the rapid transformation AI has brought to education, forcing schools to rethink the way they assess students, among myriad other disruptions. This wave of change has affected the educational consulting landscape, too.

Quality education is a must-have for parents in Southeast Asia, and they’re willing to pay top dollar to secure the futures of their children. Many of them turn to educational consulting firms, whose rates can run into the tens of thousands of dollars or even millions for multiyear packages aimed at students as young as 12.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

For instance, the Koppelman Group offers a year of application support to 10 US colleges for US$40,000 as of 2024. It’s also fairly common to see certain consultancies doubling their rates every year.

Meanwhile, nonprofits like Project Access and Questbridge serve students from lower-income families. However, they often provide limited support and lack scale because they rely on volunteers and donations.

They are unlike traditional consulting firms, which employ strategists, require intensive labor, and are accessible mostly to the most privileged students.

But will access to educational consulting remain reserved for the elite few? Or could AI – as we’ve seen in other sectors – democratize access to this service?

Is the future already here?

Some AI educational consulting upstarts have attempted to fill this gap in the market, and the space has been bubbling with acquisitions. Most of them aim to lower the cost of guidance and feedback that have historically required hours of one-to-one sessions with strategists.

One of these players is AdmitYogi, which delivers real application examples and personalized essay insights with rates starting at US$100. It claims that students who use its tool are 5x more likely to be accepted into the top 50 US schools.

See also: The edtech startup training AI to talk like your favorite teacher

Within several months of launch, the firm turned profitable and was acquired by Crimson Education.

Another AI educational consultant, Sups AI, was acquired by U.S. News to bolster CollegeAdvisor, its personalized college admissions counseling platform.

Based on the upstarts’ websites, we haven’t noticed many significant developments since their acquisitions. This might suggest that the buyers are primarily interested in the companies’ datasets, which can be integrated with their in-house offerings.

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